Driving profits with social media monitoring

It’s the latest thing out there and a few companies are jumping in to help you monitor social media. The idea behind social media monitoring is to get real time “talk” feedback for your business and leverage it to drive conversions (sales, lead generations, etc).

How are you “listening” to the different platforms of social media?

There are a few independent tools that when looked at together paint a decent picture. Specifically I’m talking about tools that search for keywords you specify in blogs, Twitalyzer which reveals your Twitter “score,” Google alerts, Facebook analytics, etc.  That’s all fine and good if you have no budget for an aggregate monitoring tool and it’s a good place to start.

I see the value in an aggregate monitoring tool because from one place you can set alerts when certain buzzwords/phrases reach a certain level so that you can react or join-in the conversation instead of always looking back and reporting to your piers about what “was” said. If you’re not sure who all is out there in the market just tweet that you’re thinking about social media monitoring and you’ll get several replies from eager salespeople willing to show you a demo. Most of them have video demos on their site and that’s always the first place I start well before agreeing to an engaged phone call.

So how can you drive profits with social media monitoring? Consider that your profits will have a bit of a higher break-even point due to the cost of the social media monitoring software. You can gauge whether or not you need to take on this cost simply by monitoring with tools like I mentioned above. If your company only has a handful of followers or you’re not seeing much action in blogs about products and services that you sell then take that into consideration.  Take into consideration the profit margin of each product/service sold, etc. All of these things have to be considered before taking the plunge.

I watched an interesting archived Webinar about how one company is connecting their existing Omniture Site Catalyst into social media channels. I’ve explored offerings from: Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian SM2, Infegy, and Attensity360. The jury is still out as I’m doing my research but what will get my business is the ability for 3rd party plug-ins such as Omniture and Salesforce.com. I also want to generate and automate reports to key people in my company. Mashable has some good articles on social media monitoring tools as well.

What makes a good social media monitoring tool the best in class? Does one tool have a clear competitive advantage other the others with value and utility?

Think about the power of strategically monitoring social media in real time (that is more robust than a column set aside for buzzwords in Tweetdeck)! Think about instantly being able to connect to social media influencers the moment you need to. Think about the power of placing a cookie into the browser of a prospect that visits your Web site, then being able to follow her around to see what social media outlets she hits to research her purchasing decision (either before or after she was on your Web site) and then leveraging that to place ads in strategic locations.  Think about being able to monitor buzzwords and trending topics in various social media outlets then adapting your content channels to fit into that conversation in real time. All of these things can drive your conversion rate to new profitability.

Ron Scott
Manager of eBusiness Strategy
ronscottjr@gmail.com

Tags: conversion rate, marketing, profitability, social media, social media monitoring, viral marketing, web analytics